-The Economic Times The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Constitutional validity does not mean sense - after all, being stupid is not illegal. Public opinion is most exercised about all schools, even those that get no aid from government, being asked to provide 25% of their seats free to poor students.  The court has pronounced this a blow for affirmative action. Private schools...

With the Supreme Court throwing its full weight behind the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, (better known as the Right to Education Act or RTE Act) on Thursday, the composition of students in schools as well as the economics of running schools will undergo dramatic changes. The apex court upheld the constitutional validity of the Act and directed all schools, including privately-run schools, irrespective of the...

Unless data gathering for the Socio Economic and Caste Census is refined, the exercise could cast out the real claimants. Have the census enumerators recently knocked on your door with swanky tablet computers in hand? If they have, it's because they have begun to go door-to-door in most States to complete the final phase of the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC). This mammoth exercise is being coordinated by more than...

-The Hindu Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, the Centre and the States must do their utmost to provide eight years of good quality schooling to all children. The unsuccessful challenge to the Act, which went into effect on April 1, 2010, came from unaided private school managements who are required to set apart 25...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...